


A Mostly Foreign Country

by Tallulah_Rasa



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-10 20:50:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2039661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tallulah_Rasa/pseuds/Tallulah_Rasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after his fellowship, Chase comes full circle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mostly Foreign Country

**Author's Note:**

> At the time I wrote this -- around Season 4, I think -- it was a glimpse into a possible future. At this point, it probably works best as an AU veering off from canon events and pairings after Season 3.

_"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." -- L.P. Hartley_

It's the timing that gets him in the end, though he doesn't think anyone who knew him during his fellowship would believe that. Foreman's message, with its carefully casual mention of Cuddy's retirement, comes just after his fifty-third birthday, when he's starting to wonder if the stories he carries in his head -- the ones about his childhood, his time at the seminary, his life at PPTH -- bear any relation to the truth. He no longer looks to the past for answers, but still, "reunion" is a word that carries the whiff of last chances. His father's death left him with enough loose ends; he doesn't want to end another chapter of his life only to find that someone has ripped out the final pages.

He can go back as a success, which helps. He's the well-known head of Diagnostics at one of Australia's best hospitals. His peers like and respect him, students vie to work with him, and even some of House's past fellows seek his input from time to time. He has a good home life. He married late and found, much to his surprise, that he had a talent for being both a good husband and a good father. His family life has given him confirmation, given him a way to make peace with his own childhood. He's happy, useful, loved. And he looks good for a man in his fifties, still reasonably trim, with a full, if graying, head of hair. 

So...it will be interesting to revisit the past, he decides, nice to see Cameron and Cuddy, good to talk to Foreman about that paper he'd published in JAMA. There will be some pointed reminders of time passing -- many of the staff members he knew have moved on or retired, and a few have died -- but he can deal with that. He can also deal with the things that are strangely the same: Wilson is still at PPTH, and, two more ex-wives later, is said to be as difficult to understand as ever. 

House is no longer part of the equation. House left PPTH suddenly, for no obvious reason, some years ago, and since then has steadfastly refused to answer anyone's calls or messages. Or so everyone says, anyway; he's never tried to reach House himself. He'd thought about it once, when he had a five-year-old meningitis patient who turned out to have something that definitely wasn't meningitis, but the case was over before he could pick up the phone.

He wonders, sometimes, if House would have answered if he'd called. Sometimes he's sure; he and House had a complicated relationship, and he thinks that they owe each other. Other times, the idea that House might feel that way is laughable. It's another part of the past he's not so sure about, but he knows now that not every question has an answer, and that not every answer is true all the time. He'd like to think that's got something to do with the wisdom of age, but he knows it's probably got more to do with raising children, and spending most of his career in diagnostics.

At dinner, he mentions the possibility of going to New Jersey to see some old colleagues. Greta, his eleven-year-old, is studiedly nonchalant, uncomfortable with a past that doesn't include her. Zoey, the nine-year-old, bolts from the table to locate New Jersey on the globe in his office. She asks if it's really winter in Princeton while it's summer outside in Sydney, and demands he describe the people he's going to visit. He talks easily of Cameron and Foreman, of how fierce Cuddy seemed when he first arrived at PPTH, of the time one of the new diagnostic fellows almost electrocuted himself trying to resuscitate a patient. He doesn't mention House. His wife doesn't call him on it; Sarah's always understood the things he doesn't say. "It could be cold in New Jersey," she says. "We'll have to make sure you have what you need to keep you warm." He knows she doesn't mean a coat. He's a lucky man.

He makes reservations, sends his itinerary to Foreman, cures a few people, tries to fix the bathroom sink, gives up and calls a plumber, takes Greta to violin lessons, watches Zoey's swim team practice. He doesn't think about Cuddy's retirement party much. He's learned to appreciate the present. Of course, sometimes he forgets what he's learned, and worries over the threads of the past and the ways they might affect the warp and weave of the future. At those times, he falls back on facts and details -- the party is in 18 days, 16 hours and 27 minutes -- and doubts his gut, but that never lasts long. He knows who he is, knows what he is, knows just how much he's capable of. He knows who he has to thank for that, but he'll settle for flying halfway around the world to thank Foreman, Cameron, and Cuddy.

.....

He goes through case files on the plane, does a few crossword puzzles, and reads a draft of an article Foreman wants to submit to _The Journal of American Neurology._ "Good thing you have a tattoo," he scrawls across it in red pen, but he adds a couple of suggestions for the first section before he falls asleep. He wakes up to change planes in California, shuffling sleepily down fluorescent corridors with his laptop and his overnight bag. He tries to remember the first time he made the trip to New Jersey, but it's too long ago now. He remembers every patient he worked on under House, but except for a few brief moments with Cameron his life outside the hospital is a blur.

Foreman meets him at the airport in Philly. "You _would_ keep your hair," Foreman huffs at him, but he grabs Chase's suitcase off the carousel, and Chase knows he's saying something about familiarity and time and change. He feels a little dislocated and unsure, himself. He can't remember how to talk to Foreman, how to be that Robert Chase.

Foreman, maybe mistaking his quiet for offense, says, "You look good. Australia must agree with you." 

Chase thinks about the pictures lining the walls of his office, of the sun-dappled garden in the back of his house, of Sarah and Greta and Zoey. "It really does," he says, and he can't help grinning.

Foreman stops then and looks Chase in the eye. "It's good to see you," he says.

"You, too," Chase says, and it strikes him how true that is. He tucks that away to muse over later, maybe in a phone call to Sarah.

"So...you think this is a good idea? This reunion?"

"Hell, no," Chase blurts out, and they stand there for a minute, laughing. Then they find their way to Foreman's very nice car and drive to Princeton. Chase falls asleep, and when he wakes up, in the driveway of Foreman's very nice house, for a minute he thinks he's a kid again, on a visit to his father's new family. He sits in the car, at the intersection of familiar and strange, feeling like a foot being shoved into an outgrown shoe. The sensation is as familiar as coffee in the morning, even if he's more of a tea-drinker these days.

"In this country, we get out of the car and go into the house," Foreman yells from the front porch, a little exasperated and a little amused. No one's talked to Chase like that in a long time. _I'm in New Jersey_ , he remembers, and he follows Foreman inside the elaborate front door.

Foreman insists Chase is jet-lagged, which he's not. He's spent far too much time in ICUs and on call to be bothered by an internal clock, and anyway, he's always been adaptable. Maybe that's because he's an Aussie child, maybe it's because he's a child of Rowan Chase. He doesn't argue with Foreman. He eats when Foreman offers food, and pretends to take a nap when Foreman suggests it. Foreman's pleased, which makes him agreeable. Foreman's always been easier to deal with when he's bitten off exactly as much as he can chew.

Eventually he showers and changes into a suit for the party. Foreman wanders into the guest room as Chase is knotting his tie.

"Your taste has improved," he notes.

"My wife picks out my clothes," Chase says. She's got a good eye for the right clothes for the professional events he attends, but she also buys him ties and vests in colors even he thinks clash. She sees there's more than one way of doing things, more than one way of looking at things. He knows now that's a rare thing.

"Good thing you got married, then," Foreman says amiably.

Chase stops fiddling with his tie. "Is that why you never married?" he asks mock-seriously. "You didn't need any help with your wardrobe?"

Foreman shrugs, and Chase can tell he's taken the question at face value, and doesn't really know the answer. "Apparently I can be difficult," he finally says.

"Really?" Chase asks, going back to his tie. "I never noticed."

Foreman snorts, so apparently he has more of a sense of humor than he used to. "I think..." he begins, and then he stops and starts again. "Maybe I stayed with him too long." His own tie perfection, he swats Chase's hands from the knot he still hasn't gotten right, and begins to retie it. Chase wonders what it's cost Foreman to admit that, but then Foreman adds, "After House, any other job -- any other life -- would be...second best. Second rate. No one with any real talent, any real drive, could leave something like that behind."

Chase doesn't answer, he just looks at Foreman.

Foreman drops the ends of Chase's tie. "Not that I'm saying..." he splutters.

"Of course not," Chase agrees easily. He thinks, not for the first time, that Foreman hasn't changed much. He couldn't help it, probably; Foreman was never very good at being uncomfortable, much less wrong. Still, it's amazing House couldn't make more of a dent in him. Chase wonders if House saw Foreman as his biggest success, or his biggest failure. What did House want from his fellows, all those years ago? Did he hope to change them? Chase came to his fellowship resigned to unanswered questions -- his childhood and a stint in the seminary saw to that -- but House opened his eyes to the possibility of solving a puzzle. Even the crosswords he still likes to do are a legacy from House, who left a book of them on the conference table when Chase was barely a week into his fellowship. Accident? Design? He'll probably never know, but Chase can accept that House, like all the major forces in his life, moved in mysterious ways.

.....

The party's at the hospital, of course, though now the hospital's a maze of wings in three imposing new buildings. A fire destroyed part of the old building, and time and a massive expansion took over the rest. Still, Chase can see echoes of the PPTH he knew all around.

Foreman leads him into a lavishly decorated function room and leaves him in the knot of people surrounding Cuddy. When Cuddy turns around she seems genuinely pleased to see him. He offers his congratulations, and she takes his hand. "This must be strange for you," she says. "You go back to a place, expecting to find what you left behind, and..." she gestures around, "it's all different." 

But it's not so different. There are traces of the old Cuddy behind the laugh lines and the silvery hair, traces of the wistfulness and the sadness that were always behind the steel. He wants to explain that things don't seem that different, and anyway, this is hardly the first home he's left and returned to, but she's swept up in a wave of well-wishers, so he just smiles and nods and lets her go. He sees her looking toward the door, but he doesn't bother to look himself. He knows House won't show up.

Foreman materializes at his side, and they head toward the bar. "You seem okay with all of this," Foreman says approvingly. "Everybody else seems so..." He rolls his eyes.

"I suppose retirement parties make people nostalgic," Chase says, snagging a crab puff from a passing waiter. 

"I think half the people here came hoping to catch a glimpse of House," Foreman says, and behind his words Chase can hear the familiar refrain, _people are idiots_. Of course, that might not be House's influence; Foreman was never that big on human nature.

"Not likely," Chase says, and it occurs to him that he's actually hoping to catch a glimpse of _himself_ , of the person he used to be all those years ago.

"You're telling me," Foreman says with a sigh. "I don't get it. I mean, yeah, the guy was brilliant, but he's been gone for years. People need to move on."

A few familiar faces from the old NICU show up then, and everyone asks him how it feels to be back. "It's like I never left," he jokes, but it's actually the truth. The past isn't prologue, Chase thinks. It's with you all the time.

"Don't look now, but Cameron's here," Foreman says in his ear. He looks, of course. Cameron catches his eye and comes right over. They exchange hellos and hugs in front of everyone, and then Cameron drags him off to a quieter corner, confident as only a woman who runs her own clinic can be.

He'd thought it might be awkward seeing Cameron again, but in truth it was a lot more awkward back when they were a couple. She demands to see pictures of his kids, and shows him pictures of her three boys. "Before you ask, I didn't name one of my kids for House," she laughs. He doesn't say that he did.

"He's here even though he's not, isn't he?" she asks, looking around. "Poor Cuddy, you can tell she's hoping he'll show up."

_Or worrying he will_ , Chase thinks, but he agrees that yeah, House is all around, even though the man himself is God-knows-where. There's a House-shaped hole in the atmosphere, like the cut-out left behind when a cartoon character runs through a wall. Or maybe it's not in the atmosphere; maybe it's in all of them, Chase thinks, though he hasn't noticed a gaping hole in his gut. Not in the last twenty years, anyway.

Cameron launches into a story from their past, as he'd expected she would. It's not as embarrassing as he'd thought. Instead, he's struck by just how young and tired and confused they'd been back then, ducklings thrown into the ocean when they'd barely learned to swim. It's easy to forgive those past versions of himself, Cameron, Foreman, everyone. He wonders if Cameron feels the same way, but he doesn't get a chance to ask; as she's winding up her story, Wilson emerges from the crowd.

Wilson looks older and more sharp-edged, like he's no longer interested in comforting anyone. "Cameron! Looking lovely as ever," he says. "And Chase!" He lets a brief pause fall. "Cuddy's retirement has certainly brought all the chicks home."

"I wouldn't call it home, exactly," Cameron says.

"Wouldn't you? I'd think you'd be a woman who'd see every place as home, and all the past in a rosy glow," Wilson says, and Chase wonders if he's taken to channeling House, now that House is no longer around. Or was Wilson always like that? Could he have missed the real Wilson between the exhaustion and the pressure and the shadow cast by House's outsized presence?

Cameron doesn't seem offended, but Chase steps in anyway. "That sounds like a nice way to see the world, actually," Chase says, smiling at her. They weren't so bad together, once. He has no regrets, and some good memories.

"Spoken like a man who's still looking for home," Wilson says, looking pointedly at Chase. "Or for something. What are you looking for, Chase?"

_I'm not looking for anything_ , Chase thinks. _I'm just looking._ He doesn't say it, because it's hard to explain something he doesn't understand all that well himself.

"I thought so," Wilson says. "He's not here, Chase. He wouldn't come in a million miles of this place tonight."

Cameron gives a rueful laugh, but Chase realizes, in a sudden flash, that Wilson's focused on the wrong symptoms, and missed the diagnosis entirely. And with that, Chase sees the whole picture: he knows where House is. It's not that hard to figure out, actually. Everybody lies, but they also can't help revealing the truth. Of course, it's a lot easier to read the clues when you have nothing personal riding on the outcome.

Chase wonders how old House was when he figured that out.

He excuses himself after a polite interval, shaking Wilson's hand and making plans to catch up with Cameron later. He slips out of the party and makes his way through the endless, shiny new corridors out to the hospital grounds. He gets lost finding the old building, and then he has to talk his way past security, but eventually he gets oriented and finds the stairway to the roof. When he pushes the door open, slightly out of breath, he sees House leaning against the retaining wall, a cigar in one hand and a beer in the other. House finally turns around, and Chase thinks that maybe House has a picture stashed in his attic. Of course, it's hard to see anything clearly on a moonlit roof in the middle of the night, but a deal with the devil would explain a lot.

"You're not a complete idiot," House greets him.

Chase takes that as an invitation, and joins him at the wall. "I know," he says. "And thanks for that, by the way."

House looks at him briefly, and then looks away again, blowing smoke rings toward the lights of Princeton. Chase wants to say more -- that in losing his job with House he found himself, that House taught him everything he knows about being a doctor, a teacher, a man -- but he knows better, so he just stands there, with the icy winter air seeping into his bones and knifing the inside of his nose, watching House's lazy smoke rings float away.

House sighs. "You're going to explode. This is an old building; all that aging wombat angst could take out the foundation. I'll give you one question. Make it good."

Chase smiles. He's not feeling particularly angsty, actually, and he's way past "ask, and ye shall receive." He didn't mean to interrupt House's private goodbye to the past. He just wanted to know if he was right.

He takes one last look at Princeton, just because the view is beautiful. Then he starts toward the stairway, but once he's at the door he looks back. Since his father, he's more careful to say goodbye when he can.

House is staring, waiting for something.

Some things haven't changed; Chase still doesn't want to disappoint House. "I had this case," he finds himself saying. "Five-year-old kid, and it looked like meningitis until it didn't, and..." He gets lost for a minute, remembering trusting gray eyes and a battered stuffed bear and the strange spikes in the EEG. When he catches himself, his hand is painfully cold on the metal doorknob, and House is still staring at him. "Do you ever do consults?" he asks. Something flashes in House's eyes, but Chase isn't sure what it is. It's been a long time since he was in a differential with House.

"You can't cure the past," House says.

"I'm not trying to," Chase says, his hand still hovering near the door. "This isn't...You had two patients with Chester-Erdheim's. The second one lived."

At that, House nods once, and his tone -- his whole demeanor -- changes. "I'm assuming you did the standard tests..."

Chase makes his way back to House's side. "Yeah, and they were all within range, until the last EEG. Which the neurologist said could have been..."

"But wasn't, I'm guessing. But you prescribed antibiotics, anyway, because..."

"Exactly." 

House says something about a bulldozer and a river, and Chase nods, though he'd thought of it as steam shovel and a swimming pool. Maybe things looked different to everyone, even if you shared charts and test results and second opinions.

Even if you shared a past.

House asks a question and then barrels on without waiting for Chase to answer, and just like that, Chase sees everything he'd missed. And House is right, it can't fix the past, but the past isn't where he lives, anyway. It's just another stamp on his passport.

House looks at him as though he knows what Chase is thinking. "You came a long way for a party," House says. He's measuring Chase, just like he always did, right from the start.

The look brings a rush of memories -- that first nervous flight to San Francisco, the dash to make the connection to New York, the little white rental car he drove to Princeton, the wrong turn that landed him at Princeton General before he finally made it to PPTH, the too-sweet coffee he gulped in the cafeteria before his interview, the look in House's eyes as he waited for Chase to answer his very first question. It seems for a minute like time's collapsed in on itself, and House is still waiting to see if he'll get it right.

"So, Dr. Chase," House says. "Did you get what you came for?" 

Twice now, Chase has flown halfway around the world to stand in just this spot. It's not the same. It's not entirely different, either. 

It was worth the trip. 

He looks House in the eye. "No," he says. "Not then. And not now."

He's not an idiot; he knows it's the right answer.

"You're full of crap," House says, and though it's dark, Chase is pretty sure he's smiling.

"Didn't you know?" Chase asks, looking out to everything that was once familiar, and everything that still is. "Everybody lies."

END


End file.
